Career Development

Whether it’s political change or organizational transformation, the business world can be disruptive (and disrupted) at times. Here are seven ways that you can keep your skills relevant when everything around you is changing.

Organizational PM

Company-wide, defined processes help with the understanding of the PM lifecycle and the integration of processes between departments. If individuals understand how what they are doing fits into the big picture—along with why they are doing it and its overall importance—they will be more excited about their work and be more efficient.

Project managers need leadership skills—specifically emotional intelligence (EI)—to augment technical expertise. But agile thinking, leadership and EI skills are just one facet of project success. Businesses need to invest in project management processes that are agile to respond to the changing needs of the organization.

featured webinar

Project learning is a vital prerequisite for innovation as it directly contributes to project and organizational capability development. As more organizations become project-based, there is an emergent need to understand how these organizations can overcome challenges of disruptive learning cycles caused by project temporality and employee mobility. Project learning occurs on the individual, team, and organizational level. Individual learning happens through intuiting and interpreting, learning by doing, experiencing using metaphors and cognitive maps. Team learning occurs through the integration of individual learnings, which result in shared understanding and mutual adjustment of mental models.

Over my career I've taken seminars and read books about Leadership learning about the different traits that make for great leaders. I think many of you are familiar with these. However, in the real wo ...

Weighted Shortest Job First is a widely used technique that can give guidance to the product owner as to how to prioritize the backlog in a rational way, supported by solid data. But if it is the only process used, it can lead to a mediocre priority list.

One of the common complaints about traditional project management methods is that they collide with customers who don’t know what they want or keep changing their minds. Agile approaches can help, but you still have to manage the customer — and the requirements!

Many managers of distributed agile software teams struggle with time zones. Team members may also struggle with maintaining a traditional eight-hour workday when separated by multiple time zones. Perhaps it’s not the time zones that are the challenge; the real challenge lies in re-thinking the workday of the team.

The longer it takes to do anything, the longer the variance of task duration. When that happens, motivation and engagement decrease, and collaboration becomes harder to maintain. These effects build on each other in a vicious cycle. This is why technical agility matters.

Working with virtual teams brings unique communication and engagement challenges. This practitioner has put together her favorite tips to improve the quality of communication with a virtual team before, during and after a meeting.

A new organizational model with a dedicated project management office and alternate roles can offer multiple benefits to deal with increased scale and diversity in the execution of projects. Learn how these new roles can provide opportunities to bring about positive change for enterprises large and small.

When Sound Transit decided to expand the light rail system in Seattle, Washington, USA, it had to find a way to tunnel under the densely populated city without disrupting life above ground. Seattle was the second worst city in the U.S. for time commuters were stuck in traffic. The University Link Light Rail Extension extended the light rail system 3.2 miles (5 kilometers) through underground tunnels providing relief for roadway congestion. The rail line opened months ahead of schedule, and the project closed US$200 million under budget. This project was a finalist for the 2017 PMI Project of the Year Award. Learn about this awarded project’s challenges, best practices, and lessons learned in this webinar.

To facilitate a meeting is to lead a group of people through a predefined agenda with clearly stated and understood goals in such a way that every attendee understands their role, adheres to the Rules of Engagement and participates according to their responsibilities within that meeting’s architecture.” Learning how to do so in spite of those attending the meeting is one of the greatest challenges any businessperson faces. Based on the final chapter of her book Everything’s a Project (and Everyone’s a Project Manager) Book Three: Communication, Christine shares that when you understand your role and your responsibility, you will own any meeting you lead.

Does your project team gel well? If not, can you really achieve success? Project success is tough to achieve as complex scope needs to be completed within compressed schedules and tight budgets. Another major challenge is the heterogeneous mix of project teams in terms of Age, Geography, Culture, Ethical outlook, etc. Ignoring cultural differences in teams is a recipe for disaster. Effective Project Leadership demands investing time in deeply understanding cultural factors, clear communication and complete transparency.This engaging webinar will help you understand key challenges, and walk you through a proven, practical six-step approach used across four continents to lead project teams to success.

Let’s be honest: disruption is a hot topic. The mantra of Silicon Valley is “move fast and break things.” Disruption is about rethinking and restricting in radical new ways that unlock very different results and very different levels of value. So what happens if we disrupt project management?

The transition to Agile takes time and it is a significant cultural change. Skeptics needs to be convinced that Agile will deliver the benefits.This presentation proposes a new way of using the "traditional" project benchmarking approach adapting it to the specifics of an Agile Project Team.

This business case can be used for IT projects. It will allow you to state the business case, document the goals and align with company strategies, mandates or compliance. Additionally, you will be able to calculate the return on investment using the total cost of ownership and the cost benefit analysis.

This spreadsheet is used to calculate and compare the TCO (total cost of ownership) and CBA (cost benefit analysis) of multiple alternative solutions. This includes costs and benefits for not only the implementation, but also for additional years of maintenance.

The project kickoff is one of the most critical activities on the project. This worksheet is intended to assist the project manager in preparing for the kickoff so that the meeting is as effective and efficient as possible.

This sample spreadsheet illustrates a simple mathematical model to help you estimate the relative priorities for a set of product functionalities and requirements. Use in conjunction with the article The 12-Point Requirements Prioritization Framework.

This template is a simple risk register/tracker template in Microsoft Excel. It enables the user to key in key information for the risk management process. The template is based on risk management experience in various domains and contains only the basic necessary fields.

This WBS Generator allows you to create a work breakdown structure by updating an Excel table and clicking a button. Users can create conditional formats to highlight keywords, change the options to modify the look and feel, maintain the WBS with on-the-fly updates, and add second- and third-level boxes. By creating custom conditional formats, project managers focus stakeholder attention to key points in the WBS.

Whether you're a fan of project management as it's currently practiced, or you desperately wish it would evolve, you'll want to check out this webinar. You are bound to be challenged. You might even be disrupted. How you think about project management will most assuredly be different.

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